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February 5th, 2023:

Weekend link dump for February 5

“AT FIRST GLANCE, electric vehicles seem like rolling disasters for the power grid. Surely the ancient, creaky network in the United States can’t handle the demand for charging those massive batteries. But a new analysis suggests that just a fraction of EV owners could make the grid more flexible and reliable by plugging into a system called vehicle-to-grid charging (V2G), or bidirectional charging.”

“The Unlikely Alliance Between Tech Bros and Radical Environmentalists”.

Et tu, Rooty?

“Biden’s expansive executive order seeks to restore competition in the economy. It’s been a long, slow road to get the whole government on board—but there are some formidable gains.”

“We are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.”

RIP, Annie Wersching, versatile actor known for roles on 24, Timeless, Star Trek: Picard, The Vampire Diaries, and as the voice of Tess on The Last Of Us.

RIP, Barrett Strong, Motown singer and songwriter whose credits include “Money (That’s What I Want)” and “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”.

RIP, Lisa Loring, actor who was the original Wednesday Addams.

“We Tried to Call the Top Donors to George Santos’ 2020 Campaign. Many Don’t Seem to Exist.”

“Priscilla Presley, widow of Elvis Presley and mother of their late daughter Lisa Marie Presley, has filed a challenge to the validity of her daughter’s will in Los Angeles Superior Court.”

RIP, Bobby Hull, Hockey Hall of Famer. As Defector says, “He was a fantastic hockey player and a horrible human being, and to pretend like one of those is somehow at odds with the other is a fool’s math.”

RIP, Cindy Williams, actor best known as Shirley from Laverne and Shirley.

“Former President Donald Trump sued famed journalist Bob Woodward on Monday over the release of audio recordings of his interviews with Trump, who claims he never agreed to allow those tapes to be sold to the public.”

Premium cable channel Showtime is being swallowed by Paramount+ into a new thing called “Paramount+ With Showtime”, and all I can say as a computer nerd is that Paramount++ was right there.

“For all of the reasons provided in my answer, which is incorporated herein in its entirety, I decline to answer the question.”

“Be honest Gen Xers, if someone were to ask you, right now, to explain Whitewater in three sentences, could you do it? I think most people couldn’t; I know for me the phrase is really just a lot of random word association. e.g., Whitewater/Clintons/land deal/suicide (remember Vince Foster??) that is shorthand for some vague criminality no one can articulate. And that’s the point.”

“The World’s Most Online Man has been so busy soothing the bruised egos of right-wing Twitter influencers that he’s once again allowed Twitter to drift dangerously close to the rocks. That’s true not just in the United States, but increasingly in Europe, where regulators aren’t amused by Musk’s cavalier attitude toward tough EU policies on hate speech and data privacy. Let’s take a look at who Elon is pissing off today.”

Here’s a cool story about a cousin of mine.

“A Brief History of Let’s Get Back to Teaching the Basics”.

“Hunter Biden’s legal team is coming out swinging. Who knows what House Republicans were expecting, but President Joe Biden’s son is not going quietly into the night as they plan their unsubstantiated investigative attacks.”

“The interview, disappointingly, doesn’t touch on a question that I thought would be of particular interest to Christianity Today’s readers: Will AI programs like ChatGPT someday be writing sermons?”

“Netflix hasn’t confirmed its plans to stop password sharing just yet”.

RIP, Bobby Beathard, Hall of Fame football executive.

“Why On Earth Are Some MAGA Republicans Wearing AR-15 Pins?” (Spoiler alert: Because they are terrible, awful, no-good people.)

“Along with the Hug Fairy and HourlyPony, it’s likely also the end of song lyric bots, book snippet bots, poetry bots, art bots, satellite imagery bots, bots that tell you how much of the year has passed, bots that remind you to take a drink of water, those that share daily screenshots from TV shows, and the many, many other bots that demonstrate the creativity a free API allows. But it’s also a lot more serious than that.”

RIP, Melinda Dillon, actor best known for A Christmas Story, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Slap Shot.

EPA asked to investigate TCEQ’s water permitting process

Need to keep an eye on this.

The Environmental Protection Agency says an informal investigation is underway after more than two dozen environmental advocacy groups submitted a petition against the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The petition alleges that state regulators are not doing enough to protect water quality in Texas, as is federally required.

The environmental groups are asking the federal agency to step in and repair Texas’ “broken system” of issuing permits to control water pollution, saying the state has made it too easy for industries to contaminate its water.

“We really feel that the TCEQ regulations, frankly, are not sufficient to ensure clean water,” said Annalisa Peace, executive director of Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, an environmental protection nonprofit based in San Antonio.

Historically, the TCEQ has been criticized for being a “reluctant” regulator and for being industry friendly. Many environmental groups have been pushing for permitting transparency, opportunities for more community input, and accountability of the state agency.

The Greater Edwards Aquifer Alliance, Environmental Integrity Project, Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, Public Citizen and 16 other groups filed the petition in 2021, stating that Texas has a major water pollution problem with state rivers, lakes and estuaries “so polluted they are considered impaired under the federal Clean Water Act.”

The Clean Water Act is a 1972 law designed to reduce pollution in America’s waterways. According to the petition, the state’s water permitting process does not recognize people who use waterways for recreational purposes, such as fishing or kayaking, to petition for a contested court hearing — only those who own land nearby.

The petition also states that industries are not required to document “the economic or social necessity of projects.” Environment advocates believe companies should provide documentation that shows there are no other options to their projects that could avoid pollution of the waters in order to obtain permits.

“They are the ones who are wanting to pollute the environment,” Eric Allmon, an attorney representing the petitioners, said about the industry. “The applicant should bear the burden of demonstrating compliance.”

Allmon said the EPA’s informal investigation is a preliminary step that determines whether there is any merit to the allegations from environmental advocates before the agency formally reviews the TCEQ’s track record on enforcing water quality standards.

[…]

If the EPA concludes that TCEQ is not enforcing the Clean Water Act, then the federal agency can proceed with a formal investigation and could revoke TCEQ’s authority to regulate water quality. The TCEQ would have 90 days to fix the problems or lose its authority.

I confess that I look at this with at least as much trepidation as any other emotion. Sure, this could end up with the TCEQ actually doing more to protect Texas’ waters. It could also end up with Ken Paxton filing a lawsuit against the EPA that ultimately results in SCOTUS doing serious damage to the Clean Water Act and/or the EPA itself. I have no trouble believing that the TCEQ has at best been half-assing this job, and I don’t want to tell these groups to be ruled by fear. But in the current climate, with the courts being what they are and a state government that has no interest in serving the public, we have to take this kind of thing into consideration. I hope I’m being way too pessimistic.

Metro CEO Lambert to retire

I wish him well.

After 44 years, Tom Lambert is hopping off the Metro bus.

Lambert, president and CEO of Metropolitan Transit Authority, is retiring at the end of the year after leading Texas’ largest transit system for 11 years.

“We have a lot of things we are working on that we are going to get done by the end of the year,” he said.

Lambert, who turns 70 in May, said his decision to step back was “the right time personally and professionally.”

His departure comes as the agency accelerates work on its long-range transit plan, approved by voters in 2019. The plan includes adding bus rapid transit along Interstate 10 west of downtown within Loop 610 and a lengthy rapid line that will go from northeast Houston to near the University of Houston and then along Westpark to western Harris County.

[…]

Lambert, who began at Metro as a security investigator in 1979, became the agency’s first police chief in 1982, serving in that role until 2010. After less than three years as executive vice president, he became interim CEO in January 2013, when previous transit agency head George Greanias resigned. He was made the permanent replacement about a year later, following a national search, after initially saying he was interested only in the top job temporarily.

During Lambert’s tenure as CEO, Metro added roughly 15 miles of new light railredesigned its bus system and opened the region’s first bus rapid transit line along Post Oak in Uptown.

Despite the additional services, however, transit use has not fully rebounded after cratering during the COVID pandemic, and the Silver Line rapid transit continues to perform below initial expectations.

Lambert said it was daily performance over projects that he wanted as his legacy.

‘I think the users and the broader community will say this agency has been responsive,” he said, noting Metro’s role in major events such as Super Bowl LI and two Astros victory parades as well as responding to disasters such as the COVID pandemic and Hurricane Harvey flooding.

“These employees fully supported this community and quite frankly brought the system up faster than anybody thought possible,” Lambert said.

I tend to think that the Metro Board is about planning and vision, while the CEO is more about execution of those plans and visions, though there will be some overlap. As such, I don’t put too much of COVID’s effect on ridership on the CEO, but whoever succeeds Lambert will certainly need to have input in how to reposition the agency now that this is where we are. Given how much Metro was able to accomplish over the past decade, the new person will have a solid foundation on which to build. I’ve met Tom Lambert a couple of times, and from where I sit I think he’s done a very good job. His successor, whose timeline for hiring is not yet set, will have a tough act to follow.

Never underestimate the power of ducks

I don’t track “favorite stories” for a given year, but if I did, this would be a lock to make it for this year.

Alicia Rowe, an Austin therapist, first came across news of her death in a British tabloid.

The Daily Mail UK had run a story online about how her parents, Kathleen and George Rowe, had been sued for feeding the neighborhood ducks after feuding with their homeowners’ association in Cypress.

The article offered zero ambiguity about her demise: “Texas couple who began feeding neighborhood ducks to cope with loss of only daughter are sued for (up to) $250,000 by HOA for causing a nuisance and are forced to sell home to cover costs,” read the article’s headline.

Alicia, who is in her 30s, was the Rowes’ only child.

She stared at the article in shock. Then she wondered how she had died. She had her suspicions.

When she texted friends about the surreal development, they quickly found that versions of the story, which first ran in the Houston Chronicle in July, were everywhere: Alicia had also died in the Washington Post and in Business Insider India and in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The rash of stories had all come out roughly five months earlier, and thoughts about what people who knew her parents imagined had happened to her – what they were still thinking – niggled at the corner of her mind.

So she called the Houston Chronicle reporter who broke the story, and the reporter called Kathleen and George Rowe’s lawyer, who called Kathleen.

“She wanted me to communicate her apologies,” the lawyer, Richard Weaver, told the Chronicle shortly afterward. “She reiterated her words to me. And it was that she had lost her daughter. When she told me she’d lost her daughter, I thought she’d passed away.”

Five months had passed, Kathleen and her lawyer had spoken to additional outlets and no one had asked for a correction.

Alicia had cut off contact with her mother years ago; she was estranged, not dead. The misunderstanding, by multiple parties (for the original story, the Chronicle had also spoken with Kathleen about the “loss” of her daughter), had landed everyone involved in a predicament. Newspapers, as a rule, don’t use euphemisms to talk about death.

[…]

A Chronicle tool charting how many people are visiting its website showed 83 people read the story in the month after the correction was issued. More than 100,000 readers had viewed the Chronicle story in the months prior.

That’s why the Chronicle proposed this followup story about her predicament, Alicia agreed. “It’s this weird intersection of media, family trauma and how fast information gets around,” she said.

Alicia said the last time she was on speaking terms with her mother was roughly six years ago.

“There was a lot of both physical and emotional abuse in my home growing up,” she said. Alicia said she was often manipulated through lies and misleading information, while being presented to those outside the family as the problem child in order to garner sympathy. That pattern led her to ask her mother to cease contact.

Soon after, her mother started telling neighbors that her daughter had “passed,” Alicia said. “She had taken down all the photos of me in the house and had planted a memorial garden to me in the backyard. I had this series of letters, basically saying, ‘If you want people to not think you are dead, you need to come back and talk to us and tell everybody that you are not dead.’”

She no longer had a copy of the letters, and Kathleen did not return phone calls about the factual dispute.

Alicia said that she had a hunch why her mom had told her lawyer and the media that she started feeding ducks after the loss of her only child: “to have a reason why she’s not following the rules.”

“It’s kind of hard to be mad at the lady with a dead daughter that just wants to feed the ducks, right?”

Hard to beat a story that contains family estrangement, newspaper style guides, and ducks. My first thought when I saw this was that surely I had blogged about the original article and this woman’s duck-feeding parents and their legal issues. But that was not the case, though I did blog about a different duck feeding matter. Instead, I had blathered about it on the radio, which is why it stuck in my mind. One way or the other, I am just drawn to a good duck tale.

This article also contained an update on the original:

Kathleen and George did not respond to calls for comment on this story. They were not home at duck-feeding time on a recent Tuesday. The ducks that had once lined up outside their porch, craning their necks to see the owners, were also gone. In their place was a “Sale Pending” sign and a lockbox on the door. The couple was moving out. On Jan. 19, their lawsuit with their HOA in the masterplanned neighborhood of Bridgeland settled.

I don’t have anything to add to that. If you read that original story, whatever you may have thought about the main characters and their HOA, now you know more.